The Late Mr Shakespeare (14 page)

I have this garret above a whorehouse which I rent. My landlord is the pie-maker, Pompey Bum. Some of his pies – the sweetest, of course – are tarts. I like cold custard ones, myself, with nutmeg sprinkled on them.

I have this bed, which is not entirely straw. I have this to sit in that was once a chair. I have this worn-out body, and this crust to eat, of which the rats have eaten only part.

Last week, as I recall, one of the girls from below gave me a fresh-laid speckled hen's egg to boil. Such treasures in heaven! No rage, no remorse, no despair. I have this soul in pawn, and this delirious heart.

Now, not for the first time, the plague has passed me by. Pickleherring has been spared to complete his great work. I live on just to write my Life of Shakespeare.

It is a lack of teeth compels me to eat only eggs, fish, hash, and other spoon-meats. I eat when I am hungry, at any hour of the day or night. I drink when I am thirsty, but only water.
And I go to bed or arise just as I feel inclined, without any reference to a clock.

It is years now since I gathered my precious data. I drank too much and I slept too little in those days. Then I would rather have broken my neck rashing downstairs than miss getting a story about Mr Shakespeare from a departing guest. The rush remains – but only in my pen. Now I commit my stories all helter-skelter to the page. Haste and muddle were always my middle names. I write, madam, tumultuarily, as these things come into my head, or as I go fishing memories out of one of my boxes. All may easily be reduced into order at your leisure, sir, by numbering my subjects with red ink, according to time and place,
et cetera
. Your cochineal paste is to be recommended for the office.

I write to prove that I am still alive, and that so is Mr Shakespeare. It is much to be deplored that people nowadays find it convenient to look down their enlightened noses at him. I know the modern taste calls him vulgar and crabbed, an uncouth spirit. I say his day was good, and that it will surely come again when the French fashions that swept into England with King Charles II have gone out again.

I predict that one day Mr William Shakespeare and his works will be so popular and so revered that children will be required to study the subject in schools and universities. You find the notion crazy, sir? Preposterous, madam? Well, it is not important. Humour an old man's whim; his maggot, even. I cannot imagine, for the life of me, that Mr Shakespeare himself would ever have wanted any such fate. But certainly one day his plays will all be staged again, properly, in their
entirety, and not in tidied-up and ‘corrected' versions to suit a newfangled classicalism. And when they are it won't be with women in the cast!

Meanwhile, here, gentle reader, just for fun, and to eke out a box with nothing in it, is an Examination Paper which I have prepared for your testing:

1. What happens in
Hamlet?
And why?

2. How many children had Lady Macbeth?

3. Who and/or what is Silvia? (Give examples.)

4. Are people murdered in tragedies or aren't they?

5. What was Puck's average speed when flying? And Ariel's? How do we know that Puck was probably the better flyer of the two?

6. Whose bawdy hand was on whose prick in
Romeo and Juliet?
(Discuss.)

7. In which play does William Shakespeare name me, and wish a plague upon me? In which other play does he also name me (twice) in the first three lines of Act II (well, almost), and then go on to prescribe the exact procedure that I am employing in the writing of this book?

8. What is the effect of the word
DUCDAME
?

9. Is this a duck or a rabbit?

10. Where is fancy bred? 

I had a friend among the younger players who could never believe that Shakespeare was taught in Stratford. He insisted that the poet went as a boy to the old school attached to Polesworth Abbey, deep in the Forest of Arden.

I have found no actual evidence that would support this. All that is certain is that in 1571, John Shakespeare, as bailiff, entertained Sir Henry Goodere of Polesworth at the Bear Inn in Bridge Street. Sir Henry was in Stratford to give judgement in an arbitration case. I have consulted the Corporation accounts, and they twice mention payments for his horse-hire.

A year later, according to my friend, John Shakespeare somehow persuaded Sir Henry to take Will into his household. There, in the rambling manor house at Polesworth, the lad served as a page. The place was quite a nest of singing birds. The poet Michael Drayton, one year older, was already a page there. Thomas Lodge (whose story
Rosalynde
provided
Mr S with the plot for
As You Like It
) seems to have kept popping in and out. Ralph Holinshed lived in the parish, and might even have taught history at the school.

If you ask me, it is all just a bit too convenient. Especially when you add the detail that this Goodere was also friends with the father of Shakespeare’s future patron, the Earl of Southampton. Of whom more anon, as my grandfather the bishop used to say.

Anyway, madam, if you can credit it, perhaps it was at Polesworth that William acquired his Latin, and got introduced in due course to polite society.

Speaking of which, there is always Goodere’s daughter. (I say ‘always’ advisedly, since her monument still leaves a space for the date of her death. I have seen it at Clifford Chambers, which is not far from Stratford.)

Well, sir, this girl’s name was Anne, and she was by all accounts remarkable. If Shakespeare ever lived under the one roof with such a creature, then I think we would have heard. Drayton was most certainly in love with her. She was the first inspiration for the figure of ‘Idea’ who appears throughout his work. The marvellous sonnet beginning
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part
was addressed to her. When her father died, she married Harry Rainsford, who was knighted at the coronation of James I. Drayton himself never married, but continued to spend his summers in her company. In later years, so they say, Anne was still straight-backed and beautiful. It was impossible to tell whether she was young or old. I had this information from Mr Shakespeare’s son-in-law, John Hall, who was her doctor. He was a sober fellow, not given to romance.

There is symmetry, of course, in having William Shakespeare
go to school with Michael Drayton. They were certainly good friends in the London years. And some say that it was after a drinking bout with Drayton and Ben Jonson that Mr Shakespeare contracted the fever that led to his death.

Also there is this music: Shake-
spear/Poles
-worth.

All the same, when it comes down to it, my friend had not a jot of hard evidence for his theory. It rests entirely on the fact of Drayton’s career as a page at Polesworth, and the way it won him patronage, and a wish that Mr S might also have enjoyed some similar start in life.

I repeat the story now because I liked the player who first propounded it. His name was David Weston, a fine steely Hal when young who then took over as Falstaff after John Heminges got the stutters. He played the old boy with fire and love, making the part his own for ever after. I shall never forget the way he used to cry
Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!
It sent a shiver down my spine, and the thought of it does so still.

John Shakespeare always liked to be known as Jack among his cronies. He said that John was no name for a fortunate man. By way of example of what he meant, he would cite all the Popes who had used that name:

John I
died in prison.

John II
and
John III
were complete nonentities.

John IV
was accused of heresy.

John V
spent most of his pontificate in bed.

John VI
and
John VII
were even bigger (or smaller?) nonentities than
Johns II
and
III
.

John VIII
was held prisoner in St Peter’s by Lambert, Duke of Spoleto. When he was released he adopted a young man called Boso as his son, and tried to get himself crowned as King of Italy. He did deals with Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat, giving them both the imperial crown, when this failed too. His last years were spent chiefly in hurling vain anathemas against his enemies. A transvestite, according
to the annalist of Fulda, he was eventually murdered by members of his own household.

John IX
had matted hair and fang-like teeth. He had to put up with a rival Pope called Sergius III. In any case, he spent most of his two-year reign inducing the council to determine that the consecration of all future Popes should take place only in the presence of the imperial legates. He was, in other words, a politician.

John X
only became Pope through the wiles of Theodora, wife of Theophylact, the most powerful noble in Rome. This Pope was really a soldier. He took the field in person against the Saracens, slaughtering many with his own hands when he gained a famous victory on the banks of the Garigliano. All his hopes of a united Italy were dashed by the death of Berangar, and he pontificated over four years of increasing anarchy and confusion, before perishing through the intrigues of Marozia, Theodora’s daughter.

John XI
was the bastard son of the Marozia just mentioned and that papal pretender Sergius III who had made
John IX’s
life such a religious misery. He was made Pope at the age of twenty-one only through the influence of his mother. He remained the mere exponent of her wishes until he was imprisoned with her in the Lateran by his half-brother Alberic, and died there.

John XII
was Alberic’s son. He succeeded his father as Pope at the age of sixteen. His original name was Octavian, but when he assumed the papal tiara he adopted the name of John – the first example, it is said, of the custom of taking a new name with elevation to the papal chair. This pseudo-John lacked all vigour, save in bed. His union of the papal office with his civic dignities proved a source of weakness rather
than of strength. His scandalous private life made the Pope’s name a byword of reproach. In order to protect his own position he called to his aid Otto the Great of Germany, to whom he granted the imperial crown. Even before Otto left Rome, however,
John XII
began to conspire against him, fearing his creature’s power might now overshadow his own authority. His intrigues were discovered by Otto who returned to Rome and summoned a council which deposed John, who was hiding in the mountains of Campania. Leo VIII was elected in his stead.
John XII
returned to Rome at the head of a formidable company as soon as Otto had left, and caused Leo to seek safety in immediate flight. Otto determined to make an effort in support of Leo, who had blue eyes, but before he could reach the city John was assassinated.

John XIII
, Leo’s successor, was Otto’s pawn. His submissive attitude towards the imperial power was so distasteful to the Romans that they expelled him from the city. On account of Otto’s German threats, they permitted him shortly afterwards to return, upon which, with the sanction of his master, he took savage vengeance on those who had opposed him. He gave the imperial crown to Otto II in assurance of his succession to his father. He also crowned Theophano as empress because he liked the look of her.

John XIV
was imperial chancellor of Otto II before his elevation to the papal chair. Otto died shortly after and John was deposed and placed in prison. He died incarcerated at the Castle of St Angelo, either by poison or starvation, no one knows.

(The Pope John who ruled for four months after
John XIV
is now omitted by the best authorities.)

John XV
was entirely in the hands of the Empress Theophano. When she let him go, this Pope, whose venality and nepotism made him famous, died of fever before the arrival of Otto III, who elevated his own kinsman Bruno to the papal dignity.

John XVI
was a Greek with five gold teeth, and a favourite of the Empress Theophano. His original name was Philagathus, which is no name for a Pope, but God knows why he took the name of John, given the terrible track record. He was wily and ambitious, but his treacherous intrigues aroused the wrath of Otto III. He died immured in a dungeon after enduring cruel and ignominous tortures at the hands of the emperor, whom he had cuckolded.

John XVII
lasted only four months in the office.

John XVIII
, a cross-patch, was during his whole pontificate the creature of the patrician John Crescentius. Ultimately he abdicated and retired to a monastery, where he soon died.

John XIX
only took holy orders to enable him to ascend the papal chair. He spent the whole of his pontificate taking bribes. He died in full possession of his dignities, and was succeeded by his nephew, who was twelve years old.

John XX
was only Pope for eight months before the roof of the palace he had built for himself at Viterbo fell down on his head.

John XXI
was a magician.

John XXII
was a tax collector, and was being tried for heresy when he died.

John XXIII
was only antipope, but he was found guilty of enough deeds of immorality, tyranny, ambition, and simony to be deposed even from that pseudo-office. Before becoming antipope this John had been a pirate. His abilities were mainly
administrative and military, although he did repent when at last caught out. He died on the 22nd of December 1419, and all visitors to the baptistery at Florence now admire, under its high baldacchino, the sombre figure sculptured by Donatello to the dethroned pontiff, who had at least the merit of bowing his head under his chastisement, and of contributing by his passive resignation to the extinction of the series of Popes which sprang from the council of Pisa, and the extinction at the same time of the series of Popes called John.

After that, Popes got the point of the name’s unluckiness, and not a single one has taken it on.

My late wife Jane was once fucked by a fellow named John Pope. She never could resist a papal pizzle.

John Shakespeare used to say that one day there would be a Pope called Jack. Jack was a name he liked. Jack Straw. Jack Sprat. Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack the Giant Killer. That time in London, in the Nag’s Head at the corner of Friday Street, he told me England’s Christian name was Jack.

As for Pope Jack – Jack Shakespeare would have wagered on the possibility, he said, with his friend Fluellen, only he knew he wouldn’t live long enough to collect.